Abstract : This project has been concerned with developing techniques for the study of liquid impact, with studying the behaviour of various infra-red transparent solids with analytic work on hard coatings and with basic studies of liquid/solid impact. Damage has been assessed quantitatively by measuring the 'residual' strength after impact and plotting strength against velocity of substrates with a hard coating. The protection offered by the coating is examined in terms of the elastic properties of the coating and its thickness. Section 2 reviews our recent liquid impact damage studies. Section 3 describes a study of the effect of thin coatings on the damage to brittle materials due to static and dynamic loading. Section 4 describes our basic work on liquid/solid impact in which techniques were developed for producing impacts of a solid with two-dimensional liquid shapes. This geometry allowed processes occurring inside the liquid to be followed in detail using high-speed photography. This section also contains an analytic model for the early stage of jet formation.